Awaydays

The moody cat you see on this month’s cover is Nicky Bell - star of this year’s hottest, dirtiest and most dangerous new movie Awaydays. I’m bound to say that - it’s based on my book, I wrote the screenplay and, after a ten-year slog through the class-infested waters of the U.K film industry, I ended up co-producing the film, too. Making Awaydays has been a story - nay, a saga in its own right. But we’re here now, it’s about to be released and just as Trainspotting unleashed a whole new generation of vibrant British talent, so does Awaydays showcase its own young stars of the future.

Awaydays is the story of Carty, a bright young lad who goes off the rails after the death of his mother. He develops a nihilistic sense that life isn’t fair and, without his subsequent behaviour ever being plotted or cynical, Carty drifts into an anti-social mindset, isolating himself from his grieving family and retreating into a world that makes sense to him. More and more, he becomes fascinated by The Pack, a well-dressed gang of football thugs who go through anyone who comes near. Carty can’t get enough of them - their clothes, their attitude, the way they inspire fear wherever they go… and he badly wants to belong. He thinks he’s found his way in when he meets Elvis, one of The Pack’s top boys, at a gig. But Elvis has grown tired of the leggings, the beatings, the slashings The Pack dish out and he’s searching for his own identity, away from the horde. In Carty, he thinks he’s found a kindred spirit, and he does everything to try and deflect him away from the brutal negativity of The Pack. It’s a classic rites-of-passage story that will reverberate with anyone who’s ever run with a gang, experienced the fear and the sheer thrill of mob anarchy, but quietly questioned its rights and wrongs, too. In short, Awaydays is a classic teenage rampage, an adrenalin-charged football gang thriller with real heart and soul.

The film could have been made a few years ago, and there were a lot of close calls and near misses before we decided to go down the lo-fi, DIY, micro-budget route with Awaydays. The BBC flirted with it, but ultimately worried why anyone would care about two such sweet tender hooligans as Carty and Elvis. In 2003, Channel Four came very close to green-lighting it, and seemed to understand the absolute critical importance of getting the clobber right in a film like this. Awaydays is set in the early days of Casual, where the right haircut, the right trainies, the right jacket is what sets you apart and gives you your reason for being. By 2003, everybody was wearing fashion pumps, everyone understood retro and most were aware of the fashion’s football hooligan roots. Part of the joy of Awaydays was to bring that retro world to life, showing a vital element of our popular culture that has largely gone unheralded. Through Carty, you’d discover the ins and outs of terrace fashion. Painfully, he starts off wearing Green Flash and is always a step behind The Pack. He gets Samba, they get Stan Smiths. He gets Stan Smiths, they’ve moved onto Forest Hills or Nastase. But it’s all the spice of life when you’re young. These are the things that really matter, and these are the details that make a film like this live and breathe.

But C4, having set great store by pledging a significant budget to source good, original clothing and make The Pack look fantastic suddenly made a unilateral declaration that any film they made should be contemporary. Henceforth, they would have no interest in ‘period’ movie projects, and even though Awaydays was set in the very recent past and was certain to resonate massively with young audiences, it was put into turnaround. In other words, the film was dead.

But by that point, I had got the bug. I’d written the script and, in doing so, had a glimpse as to how good this film could be. In my head, The Pack weren’t just lines on a page. They were real to me, a prowling, feral entity and I could see the mob as an iconic film presence. Movies like Reservoir Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, even The Warriors are remembered for their look as well as their content. There’s an abiding, indelible image you associate with those gangs that lives on in the mind long after the end credits have rolled. Like Carty, I started to become obsessed by The Pack. I had to see this through.

Myself and long time buddy Dave Hughes set up Red Union Films with the intention of making the kind of cult movies that the bigger organisations were unlikely to ‘get’. Awaydays is the first, but we have a slew of great projects in development and we’ll never have to answer to a posh lady as to why these unrepentantly rogue males actually matter! With lo-fi films like ours, there is no margin for error. You have to get everything right, as you have neither the time nor the budget to correct mistakes. Above all, casting is fundamental to whether a film is going to fly - a great actor can elevate a tiny set-up into movie magic, and that’s exactly what we were after. For Awaydays we were looking for a whole new school of talent, a brand new British rat-pack who would seize the opportunity hungrily, charge out there and make a fucking great big noise. Just as if we were building a football team, we established a strong spine first. In Stephen Graham we were lucky to snap up the best young character actor in the world. We offered him the role of Pack leader John Godden without even auditioning him - we knew what he could do. We also nabbed Ian Puleston-Davies and Holliday Grainger, both young, both brilliant but already legends in the trade for their intuitive, one-take performances.

But once we’d settled on our foundations, we needed the spark, the sex, the savagery and the chemistry of Carty and Elvis. We needed alchemy between them - the Lionel Messi ingredient, the Torres factor that lights up a team. We needed magic. In Nicky Bell (Carty) and Liam Boyle (Elvis), I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say we’ve found two of the biggest young stars of the future. With Oliver Lee (Baby) and Sean Ward (Robbie), we’ve created the Pack Pack, and given their average age of 20, you’d better get used to having them around for a bit.